Rants & Raves

In-flight Wi-FiBoeing rolls out wireless Net access for $10 an hour. JAL and Lufthansa are on board. Let's hope it flies with US carriers.

Microsoft Nailed by EUEuro trustbusters order Redmond to unbundle and pay a $613 million fine. Big deal. The appeals will likely outlive Windows 2098.

RFID ScaresSmart tags will be in everything from Wheaties to Wranglers. But don't worry: Creeps can't take inventory of your cupboards. RFIDs aren't that smart.

KEY:

It's got legs

Cut off at the knees

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essay

By Gary Wolf

It is happening again. A little more than seven years ago, the cover of Wired showed a giant blue hand shoving forward, as if into your face. Inspired by the success of PointCast, a clever application that displayed news headlines as a screensaver, our "Push!" story argued that Web browsers were about to become obsolete (Wired, 5.03). In the near future, we proclaimed, every kind of content would be popping up automatically on every imaginable device, from PCs and mobile phones to PDAs and wristwatches.

Rants & Raves

As coauthor of this infamous cover story, I was well-positioned to observe the debacle that followed. Browsers did not disappear. Instead, they became the world's standard interface for electronic information. PointCast, after spurning a buyout offer of more than $350 million from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., went on to spectacular failure. Users ignored it, system administrators banned it, and the market punished it. Before long, push was a byword for hype.

But recently, there has been a twist. I first noticed it when, after finishing a book about the history of Wired, I posted an entry on my blog, ruefully revisiting the push article. Though I dubbed it "the worst story Wired ever published," I quickly began to get feedback from readers who argued that the predictions in the piece were coming true after all. The inspiring technology this time is RSS, a specification that allows easy syndication of news, blogs, and other frequently updated sources.

There is a clear parallel between the excitement of the PointCast days and the enthusiasm for RSS today, one that goes further than easy harvesting of news headlines. Search engine results, product information, new music, notification of recent blog comments, and many other types of digital information are becoming available through RSS. This dialect of XML brings us the Web as an evolving environment: customizable, variable in intensity, and always on. This is the old promise of push. We can see the potential for radically new types of media - again.

But while the vision has become vivid once more, the seamless Web of the original push fantasy is almost as far away as ever. This is because the Web has grown far bigger, more diverse, more open, and messier. It cannot be unified by a single easy-to-learn, concretely useful specification like RSS.

As a dramatization of this case of "success within limits," you might read some of the hot posts flying between Dave Winer, one of the creators of RSS, and the developers advocating a new syndication specification called Atom. The evidence of their passionate antagonism can be tracked across hundreds of blogs. And the essence of their disagreement says a great deal about RSS and push.

One of the virtues of RSS is its simplicity. (The abbreviation stands for "real simple syndication.") But with this simplicity comes a certain crudeness. To Atom's advocates, RSS is confining and arbitrary because all it's really good for is syndicating news feeds. The Atomites argue that if RSS were replaced by a more rigorous and more general specification, it could surmount some current difficulties and go a lot further. But Winer wants to keep it simple and easy to use, and he has argued against all attempts to elevate RSS to a "higher" level.

As long as Winer has anything to say about it, there is little chance that RSS will become anything but a better version of what it is today: a tool for syndicating news and navigating frequently updated blogs. And this might be a good thing, because a huge number of other interesting push tools are coming online. For instance, Yahoo! can send stock alerts at customized thresholds to your PDA; Intuit will find the average going eBay price for an item you intend to donate to charity; Google lets you check prices for products across the Web from your cell phone.

I recently had a short email conversation with Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs (of Blogger fame), and, most recently, Kinja, which is producing a new Web-based blog reader to compete with Bloglines and other popular tools. The idea is to bring updated news and weblog headlines onto the desktop, allowing users to go through them without browsing dozens of individual sites. This is push. But RSS is only one piece of it. Hourihan points out that RSS depends on a "polling" system in which aggregators automatically visit blogs and see what's new. "Can you imagine 1 million news readers all checking 300-plus sites every 15 minutes?" Hourihan asks. "Or even every hour? It's so horribly inefficient." She hopes to see some sort of peer-to-peer solution.

Meanwhile, there are countless examples of independent applications doing little pieces of the work we originally touted in our terribly incorrect - but also, it turns out, weirdly prescient - story on push. Each day there are new announcements; some are based on RSS, but many are not. There are families of acronyms to explain how these applications can, and sometimes even do, work together. But one of the things we have learned since push is that at the level of real applications, we will continue to live in a world of translations, patches, interruptions, incomplete instructions, neat tricks, false hopes, and a receding universality that's always almost just as far away.

Paradoxically, this is a sign that the progress is real.

Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com) is the author of Wired: A Romance.

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implants

The brain stem, responsible for important jobs like regulating breathing and heart rate, is a delicate area to muck around in. But plug in the right kind of electrodes, and it becomes an excellent human-machine interface.

Rants & Raves

"I went from absolutely nothing to hearing what seems like everything," says Molly Brown, one of two deaf patients who've gone cyborg. Both women had tumors removed from their auditory nerves during treatment for a rare genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis type 2. To restore their hearing, the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles outfitted each with a penetrating auditory brain stem implant, a gadget that connects an external microphone to eight microscopically thin electrodes jacked directly into nerve tissue. Older auditory brain stem implants hugged the outside of the brain stem and provided less precise sound. (Cochlear implants, which stimulate auditory nerves in the inner ear, weren't even an option - the neurological damage was too far upstream.) Seven of the eight electrodes worked for Brown.

Early results bode well for other types of neurosurgery: "Microelectrodes will be used in the retina for visual stimulation, in the spinal cord for pain control, and to help alleviate paralysis in quadriplegics," says Bob Shannon, a biomedical engineer at the institute who hopes to implant at least 25 more of the experimental devices.

- Jesse Freund

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marketing

Tiger Woods has one. So does LeBron James. Ditto Dale Earnhardt Jr. No, it's not a $20 million licensing deal. It's something of potentially greater value: a personal logo. What started with Nike and Michael "Air" Jordan in the 1980s is standard marketing procedure today - the celebrity-as-conglomerate, the star-as-brand. Strangely, as the trend catches on, the logos are getting harder to read. Sometimes, style interferes with the sell.

Rants & Raves

Before a recent business trip, I got a new Nokia 6600 cell phone, which connected my laptop to the Internet using Europe's GPRS standard. T-Mobile, my carrier, has Internet roaming agreements in more than 50 countries, so I could fly into a city, flip open my computer, and presto: Internet everywhere. It was sooo cool until I got my bill. It turns out that a month of wireless abandon on a GPRS network costs $3,500. That's like having my PowerBook stolen by my carrier (but not before getting beaten over the head with it). Yes, the company's access rates appear on its Web site. And yes, I paid. But until we have cheap, flat-rate data roaming, the wireless future will belong to someone else.

1/21/04: $269.96Blogging (18 Mbytes) the World Economic Forum from a friend's house in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland.

1/26/04: $422.32Reading blogs in a car bound for the Zurich airport, watching the snow, feeling dapper. 28 Mbytes later ...

- Joichi Ito

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R.I.P., Concorde. The next generation of business jets may also break the sound barrier - in a quieter, more fuel-efficient fashion. Pratt and Whitney's F119 engine was built for the Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor, but it could boost the performance of executive planes, too. The key isn't miles per hour; it's miles per gallon. An aircraft outfitted with the F119 can reach Mach 1 without an afterburner, so it uses less gas. What's more, vectored thrust - the precise control of exhaust direction - and better aerodynamics may hush the sonic booms that confined Concorde to transoceanic flights. Pratt's party line is that it has no plans to develop the F119 for civilian use, but an insider says studies of how to convert it are under way. Market research done for Gulfstream and others predicts a demand for 512 ultrafast jets - at $80 million a piece - between 2010 and 2030.

Rants & Raves

As Hurricane Isabel barreled toward North Carolina in September, the guardians of US public health hustled to their Command Center. Filled with giant plasma screens, terrestrial and satellite Internet connections, a triple-redundant phone system, and 20 terabytes of data storage, it's where the Department of Health and Human Services monitors severe storms, outbreaks of West Nile fever, incidents of mysterious white powder in mail rooms, and other potential catastrophes. Its secret weapon: geographic information systems software that collects data from federal agencies, state and local governments, and international health organizations. The global network is helping Asian governments track SARS and avian flu.

Rants & Raves

HHS installed the Command Center in a conference room at its DC headquarters after the anthrax attacks of 2001, widely regarded as a government PR disaster. The extreme makeover took 59 days and $3.7 million. Today, the center is staffed around the clock, with some 50 workers called in when disaster strikes or the national alert level rises to orange. If Washington itself is the target, HHS has a mobile command center and two backups sited at - all together now - undisclosed locations.

- Patricia Thomas

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addiction

Your cell phone beeps constantly with incoming text messages. But you could quit anytime, right? Right? "A text can be like a cigarette," says Roy Bailey, an independent clinical psychologist. "It produces a squirt of dopamine, so you text to get another hit." Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure - alcohol and chocolate kick it up, too. Unlike the tobacco industry, the telcos probably don't have to worry about billion-dollar lawsuits. But cases of Short Message Service addiction are being reported in Europe; one Danish junkie was sending more than 200 messages a day. Mark Collins, addiction specialist at the Priory, a London substance abuse clinic, told the British press that he has seen a surge in behavioral addictions, including texting. The symptoms are classic: fixation, altered mood, and even withdrawal. Expect treatment to include cognitive therapy. Help is just a phone call away.

Rants & Raves

Stick your finger in a socket these days and you might just delete your email. Well, OK, not quite. But for the past decade, electric utilities have been trying to draw attention to the fact that Internet-ready copper wiring exists in virtually every building in the US. Because electrical current is transmitted at low frequencies (10 to 490 kHz), data running at higher frequencies (1 to 30 MHz) can travel through the same wire. The promise: All you have to do is plug a $100 modem into your wall socket, connect it to your USB or Ethernet port, and you're online.

Rants & Raves

Earlier this year, the FCC endorsed the technology, hoping that broadband over power lines - call it BPL - would accelerate the availability of high-speed Net access, which now reaches 38 percent of Internet users. Service providers like EarthLink and and AT&T are signing on, and analysts say 2004 will be a breakthrough year for BPL. So why did we waste all this time on DSL and cable?

Short answer: BPL is not as simple as it sounds. The power-line dream first ran into trouble in 1999 when Nortel pulled out of a pioneering effort to bring a copper-wire network to Manchester, England. The grid would be a nearly perfect data network - if we shut off all electrical devices. Refrigerator motors, air conditioners, and halogen bulbs create an immense amount of distorting noise. To overcome this, Nortel had to crank up its data signal. Two problems developed: Streetlights started blinking and the power lines turned into giant antennas, interfering with military, air-traffic, and emergency communication networks.

Inspired by advances in wireless technology, power-line researchers began spreading data across multiple frequencies and modulating it higher or lower to dodge the noise. The data became more nimble and needed less energy to fend off distortion, which solved the interference problem (though ham radio operators continue to say it messes with their late-night chatter).

The next hurdle was figuring out how to get the signal through transformers that convert medium-voltage electricity from the power lines to the low voltage that goes to your sockets. A handful of companies have come up with innovative solutions, ranging from a simple cable that jumps the voltage converter to Wi-Fi nodes on the overhead power lines. The Wi-Fi fix would blanket the neighborhood with broadband and remove the need for a wall socket modem.

Meanwhile, the ranks of potential ISPs are swelling. EarthLink has announced the partial acquisition of a power-line service provider and launched its first roll-out with a utility in North Carolina. About a dozen other utilities have also started trials, including heavyweights like Con Edison in New York and Pepco in Maryland. Even AT&T has announced a power-line initiative.

The main question now is whether all this makes business sense. So far, broadband power-line trials have been priced competitively - around $40 a month. But the upfront costs are high. To extend the system to outlying areas, utilities are installing miles of fiber-optic cable and crimping thousands of costly repeaters onto electric lines.

Consumer advocates have grumbled that utilities could exploit their monopoly by subsidizing an expensive Internet foray, forcing consumers to pay for the system's upgrade. But state regulators, mirroring the FCC's position, are likely to see the increase in broadband competition as a good thing. So if you're frustrated with your local phone or cable provider, look for broadband over power lines in a socket near you.

Joshua Davis (jd@joshuadavis.net) is a Wired contributing editor.

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MicropunditA blogger who gains a reputation as a reliable critic or authority on a particular subject.

Climate WarsThe human conflicts - from riots to nuclear strikes - that the Pentagon believes will be triggered by severe shifts in global climate.

Taste TribesIncreasingly specialized affinity groups built around shared cultural interests and brought together through online social networks, blogs, egroups, and mailing lists.

MusclebotsMicromachines powered by heart muscle fibers. Future applications include everything from nerve stimulation for paralyzed people to swarms of repairbots that could maintain spacecraft exteriors.

Late last year, owners of Adobe's Photoshop CS began to notice a peculiar quirk in the software: It refused to open files containing images of $20 bills. At first, Adobe kept quiet about whether the feature - or was it a bug? - even existed. But eventually the company admitted that it had seeded the program with anticounterfeiting controls courtesy of the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, a consortium created by the industrial nations known as the Group of 10. They're apparently scared witless by digifeiting, the home brewing of currency with low-cost desktops and inkjets. Turns out Photoshop was just the beginning of solutions that are equal parts clever and chilling.

Rants & Raves

Error messages: The anticounterfeiting controls in Photoshop CS were concocted by the Counterfeit Deterrence Group. The software, which is also in Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 8, spots markers embedded in currency. If an image file contains them, an error that scolds the user pops up. The group's software code is a closely guarded secret; even Adobe says it doesn't know exactly which bills are protected.

URL warnings: After Adobe's admission this winter, privacy guru Richard Smith wondered what other secrets companies might be hiding in their code. He found that HP has armed several high-end printers with drivers that recognize when a currency image has been queued. The printer spits out only an inch of the bill, followed by the URL for a site run by the European Central Bank, rulesforuse.org. HP refuses to talk about the software.

Scanner controls: In March, the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers' central bank) announced that leading hardware and software makers had adopted the consortium's controls. The statement omitted all details, but an anonymous bank official told the Associated Press that the controls would be in scanner software by year's end.

Color detection: HP researchers are playing with a color-detection technology that would recognize when a queued document features a hue too similar to those found in currency. The printer would automatically alter the color so the difference between, say, banknote green and a counterfeit dollar could be detected by any cashier. In a white paper, HP assures photographers that the shifts won't affect other images that "use lots of green."

Bill recognition: Xerox researcher Zhigang Fan pioneered anticounterfeiting technology; he patented his first currency-detection method back in 1994. All Xerox color copiers now come equipped with algorithms that can detect when a bill is on the glass, regardless of the currency's orientation. Because Xerox licenses its anti-counterfeiting technology worldwide, the controls can be tweaked to recognize a bhat as easily as a euro.

- Brendan I. Koerner

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Faster than a speeding World Cup champ. Stronger than an all-carbon catamaran. Able to support two ultralight smart masts on a single hull. It's Mari-Cha IV! The $10 million superyacht sails at speeds of up to 40 knots - more than twice as fast as its closest competition - thanks in part to its carbon-fiber construction. Though others have tried this formula, Mari-Cha's engineers figured out how to keep it light and make it sturdy enough to withstand rough seas. (At 50 tons, the boat weighs about half as much as other vessels its size.) Mari-Cha's unique rig configuration adds to its agility; the 148-foot masts (inset) stand a distant 60 feet apart, support five sails, and sport sensors that detect bending. The yacht already holds world records for speed and distance, and could set another in the Jules Verne race that circumnavigates the globe in January. Time to beat: 93 days, 3 hours, 57 minutes.

Rants & Raves

PINs and passwords are on their way out. Banks, stores, and law enforcement agencies would rather scan your body parts to check your identity. Last year, manufacturers reported $928 million in biometric equipment sales, up 54 percent from 2002, and they expect to reach $1.5 billion this year. Here are some of the distinguishing features you'll soon be waving around in lieu of a driver's license.

Rants & Raves

IrisThe colored part of the eye has unique furrows, striations, pits, and variations.Where it's checked: In airports, including JFK's tarmac, Frankfurt immigration, and check-in at Narita in Tokyo.Quirk: Can't be scanned without your permission, so it can't be used for surveillance.

FingerEach fingertip has "minutiae" - 30 to 40 landmarks where ridges come together or end.Where it's checked: In keychain USB drives, mouses, and PDAs now; at Piggly Wiggly checkout counters and on cell phones this summer.Quirk: Dirt, grime, and oil on hands can mar an image.

EarA digital image or print shows distinctive shapes, ridges made of cartilage.Where it's checked: In crime labs in the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.Quirk: Pressure, piercings, and age change ear shape.

OdorHuman scent has roughly 30 distinct, detectable chemical components.Where it's checked: Nowhere yet, but Darpa put up $3.2 million to sniff around.Quirk: No amount of scrubbing or deodorant can cover it up, and it stays on your clothes after you've worn them.

HandBlood vessels absorb infrared light more rapidly than surrounding tissue does.Where it's checked: In ATMs in Japan later this year. A new, touch-free scanner will prevent the spread of germs.Quirk: Vein patterns change after death. (Good news! No one can steal your ID by cutting you up.)

- Greta Lorge

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obsessed

When Robert Ferrell goes medieval, he really goes medieval. The full-blown feudal village he's hammering together on his 44-acre ranch near San Antonio isn't some Renaissance faire pastiche. It's all about authenticity. No food courts serving rat-on-a-stick, no juggling, no tights - just history, minus the plague and famine.

Rants & Raves

The 46-year-old computer security specialist for the US Department of the Interior has been planning his fiefdom, dubbed Savernake, for two decades. "I like medieval feudal villages, but I happen to have been born on the wrong continent to hang around in one," he says. "The only solutions were, move to Europe or build my own." In 1999, he bought a former llama ranch - it was cheap and too small and hilly to graze cattle - and spent the next few years teaching himself construction. Building a house is as much an act of creation as writing code, Ferrell says. "If you make it up as you go, you're hacking." His crowning achievement so far: Strawhenge, a replica (to scale) of Stonehenge's inner circle made of stucco-covered straw bales and rebar anchored in concrete. Ferrell used a topographical map to help align his 1,300-pound "stones" to lunar events and solstices, just like the real thing. It took him almost a month to finish. "Of course, then I had to build the Chapel of St. Adalbert for my very Catholic wife," he says.

Ferrell's upcoming projects include a blacksmith's forge, a monastery, and a manor house. Anon, when he finishes in 2010 or so, public tours can begin (Ferrell has already hosted up to 300 reenactors). He budgets the completed village at roughly $750,000, not including his time - just mowing all the grass takes a couple hours a day for three weeks. At least he doesn't have to battle barbarian hordes.

- Michelle Delio

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update

It wasn't exactly the Daytona 500. Of the 13 bots that started Darpa's 142-mile desert race (Wired 12.03), none finished. The robocycle didn't even qualify, but it gave a demo. There's always next year, when first prize doubles to $2 million. Here are the 2004 results.

Planes, trains, and autobahns make Europe a very noisy place - especially if you're in a metropolitan area, or anywhere near a right-of-way. In response to an EU mandate that cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants produce "noise maps" by 2007, the consulting firm Accon plotted the cacophony in Stuttgart, Germany. This map of the airport and its environs depicts decibel levels from various sources (aircraft, cars, sporting events), plus the impact of acoustical barriers. Dark gray shows regions as loud as, say, a mixer blending pastry for strudel; pink and purple call out places with noise the level of a vacuum cleaner picking up the crumbs; red signals sound comparable to folks talking about dessert. Only blue and green spots would be considered quiet residential areas. Travel advisory: Pack your earplugs.

Rants & Raves

The legend of Woz dates back to 1976, when, as a teenager, Steve Wozniak engineered Apple's early personal computers. Shortly after the Macintosh was introduced, Woz quit to teach public school. Now, 20 years later, he's taking another run at retail as CEO of Wheels of Zeus, or wOz. The startup is working with Motorola to offer a low-cost GPS-based tracking system that lets consumers keep tabs on keys, cars, or even kids via wireless radio signals and broadband Internet. Sure, it sounds kooky. But, back in the '70s, so did a personal computer.

Rants & Raves

WIRED: What's the story with wOz?WOZNIAK: The idea started off with humor, but we landed on the concept of people locating important things. Keeping track of children and finding pets when they're not where they're supposed to be. Plus notification. There's nothing that does that.

What humor? Was it a joke?The original idea was to intercept cop signals to report where patrol cars were and display that information in your car via GPS.

I'd buy one of those.Everyone says they'd buy one.

So how does your gadget find stuff?We came up with a very low-power platform. It has small devices that can be located and devices that help you do the locating. The locating devices connect to the Internet, and that, in turn, connects to our backend servers. We designed a network that is really applicable to this. Plus, the user's end is portable, so a user walks around with a little device that does the job of finding. There's a user interface on our device and one on the Internet.

It could be a little creepy.Everybody wants to track things. But not everyone will buy into this, just like not everyone buys a home security system.

I don't even like caller ID.I do. There's an 800 number you can use to make a call and give any ID you want. Want to get someone to answer the phone? Make the call from somebody important.

And that doesn't bother you?If you want to find out if your spouse is visiting a whorehouse or see where your kids are hanging around after school, that bothers me. I believe strongly in a person's right to privacy. But my life is an open world. I've had a Wozcam on the Web for 10 years. As far as someone knowing where I am, I am one of the few people who wouldn't mind. You should live in an open world, too. If that were true of everyone, you wouldn't have to worry about people.

OK, but what's with the company name?The name was a joke. I got onto the Internet in the earliest days, so I owned a three-letter dotcom. I thought, rather than Woz.com, what company name can I make up for Woz? The words just popped into my head: Wheels of Zeus.

You don't seem like a self-promotional kind of guy.No. I would resent that. And yet they put my name on my business card in three places. Look, I designed a good computer. That should be it. But for everybody, the computer is the best toy in their life, and they look for symbols to back it up. That's fine. If people want symbols, I'll be a good one. I'll help kids and education. I'll represent technologists as good.